Glen Roven, Emmy-Winning Composer and Conductor, Dies at 60

Glen Roven, a prodigiously versatile musician who conducted on Broadway when he was 19 and went on to become a prolific composer and an Emmy-winning music director, died on July 25 in Manhattan. He was 60.

The cause was Legionnaires’ disease, his sister, Janice Roven, said.

An exuberant virtuoso whose only formal training was the piano lessons he took while growing up in Brooklyn, Mr. Roven began his career while in high school as a rehearsal pianist for “Pippin,” which opened on Broadway in 1972. While still a teenager, he became musical director of “Sugar Babies,” the tribute to burlesque starring Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller, which opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater in 1979.

Mr. Roven dropped out of Columbia College and remained with the show for all 1,208 performances over its nearly three-year run. Afterward, he often dined with Ms. Miller and her celebrity circle, some of whom also became his friends and colleagues.

Mr. Roven was often described as Broadway’s youngest conductor. His few competitors for the title included Alfred Newman, born in 1900, who became a music director at 17 and started conducting Gershwin musicals at 19. But Mr. Roven was equally at home in classical music.

He conducted two inaugural concerts for President Bill Clinton and two for President George W. Bush; the last television performances by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.; and concerts by the Israel Philharmonic, the National Symphony in Washington, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic, among others.

He composed the scores for John Guare’s plays “Lydie Breeze” and “Gardenia,” Christopher Isherwood’s “A Meeting by the River” and Larry Gelbart’s “Mastergate.” He wrote the violin concerto “The Runaway Bunny” and made his Carnegie Hall debut conducting the American Symphony Orchestra in a performance of it in 2008.

Mr. Roven also wrote an aria titled “Goodnight Moon” — based, like “The Runaway Bunny,” on a beloved children’s book by Margaret Wise Brown. He co-produced the album “An AIDS Quilt Songbook: Sing for Hope.” And for his own label, Roven Records, he produced “Hopes and Dreams” for the Lullaby Project, which provides support for new mothers and their infants.

In 2017, as an alternative presidential inaugural, he composed “The Hillary Speeches,” a group of songs whose texts were drawn from Hillary Clinton’s own words and performed by two dozen opera and Broadway singers in a streamed video recital.

Mr. Roven shared an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in music direction in 1986 for the 40th annual Tony Awards and won in the same category in 1996 for “Sinatra: 80 Years My Way.”

Glen Paul Roven was born on July 13, 1958, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to Dr. Milton D. Roven, a prominent podiatrist, and Ruth (Katz) Roven, an accountant. He graduated from Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn.

“His real love was setting some of the world’s greatest poetry to his own harmonically complex, fantastically atmospheric music,” Tom Lutz and Laurie Winer wrote in a tribute in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

While he was circumspect about his academic credentials, Mr. Roven taught at universities and wrote music and literary criticism.

“He was, as a friend once said, a cultured, educated sophisticate disguised as a little Brooklyn boy with stains on his shirt,” Mr. Lutz and Ms. Winer wrote. “Or vice versa.”

In addition to his sister, he is survived by his mother. His husband, Robin Addison, died in 2011.

Some of Mr. Roven’s fondest memories were of working with Mickey Rooney on “Sugar Babies.” He recalled being summoned to Rooney’s dressing room during an intermission, only to find the actor prancing around in his underwear.

“ ‘Glen, I just thought of this great movie. I want to do it for you,’ ” Mr. Roven quoted Rooney as saying in The New York Times shortly after Rooney died in 2014. “And Mickey Rooney then proceeded to act out this entire movie musical in his dressing room — all the parts, all the songs, all the choreography.

“I was 19 and there was Mickey, performing just for me in his underwear.”

Correction:

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. Roven was born. It was 1958, not 1968. As the obituary correctly notes, he was 60.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: Glen Roven, 60, Emmy-Winning Composer and Conductor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe